Copyright and Fair Use

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A healthy copyright system must balance the need to provide strong economic incentives through exclusive rights with the need to protect important public interests like free speech and expression. Fair use is foundational to that balance. It's role is to prevent copyright from stifling the creativity it is supposed to foster, and from imposing other burdens that would inhibit rather than promote the creation and spread of knowledge and learning.

The Fair Use Project (FUP) was founded in 2006 to provide legal support to a range of projects designed to clarify, and extend, the boundaries of fair use in order to enhance creative freedom and protect important public rights. It is the only organization in the country dedicated specifically to providing free and comprehensive legal representation to authors, filmmakers, artists, musicians and other content creators who face unmerited copyright claims, or other improper restrictions on their expressive interests. The FUP has litigated important cases across the country, and in the Supreme Court of the United States, and worked with scores of filmmakers and other content creators to secure the unimpeded release of their work.

Daniel is a Staff Attorney and Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is part of EFF's intellectual property team and focuses on patent reform. Before joining EFF, Daniel was a Residential Fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet & Society where he represented writers, painters, filmmakers, and others who rely on fair use to create their art and scholarship.

Miquel Peguera, Associate Professor of Law at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) (Barcelona, Spain). PhD in Law, University of Barcelona (2006), with a dissertation on the liability of Internet intermediaries. Visiting Scholar at the University of Columbia School of Law (2007-08). His research focuses on the legal aspects of the information society, and particularly on ISPs’ liability. His publications include “When the Cached Link is the Weakest Link: Search Engine Caches under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act”, 56 Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A.

Ademir splits his time between two worlds. He is part-time is in academia, currently taking a PhD at University of Sao Paulo. His research focuses on efforts by Latin American regulators to promote increased access to broadband Internet and implement a network neutrality regime. He has been particularly interested in the debate involving the regulation of network neutrality in Brazil and the US, and has submitted contributions to the Brazilian Ministry of Justice and to the US Federal Communications Commission.

Chris Ridder is a Non-Residential Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society (CIS). His research interests include the full range of issues that arise at the intersection of technology and the law, including the application of intellectual property law to software and the Internet, and the impact of technological change on privacy and civil liberties. Prior to joining CIS, Chris was an associate at Simpson Thacher and Barltett LLP, where he litigated intellectual property and complex commercial cases.

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I had an AHAAA moment last night reading Martha Woodmansee’s „ The Author, Art, and the Market”. She writes „As my sketch of writers’ struggles suggests, eighteenth-century Germany found itself in a transitional phase between the limited patronage of an aristocratic age and the democratic patronage of the marketplace. With the growth of a middle class, demand for reading material increased steadily, enticing writers to try to earn a livelihood from the sale of their writings to a buying public.

Plaintiff Carol Loeb Shloss (“Plaintiff”) is the author of Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, a book describing the creative impact of Lucia Joyce on the literary works of her father, author James Joyce. Defendants Seán Sweeney and the Estate of James Joyce (“Defendants”) own and control copyrights in some of the works of James Joyce and his relatives. When Plaintiff contacted the grandson of James Joyce to request help in writing her book, Joyce’s grandson refused.

Plaintiff Therapeutic Research Faculty sued defendants – NBTY, Rexall Sundown, and Le Naturiste J.M.B. – for violating the terms of a single user license by allowing access and use by multiple individuals. Therapeutic Research Faculty maintains a database of pharmacist-prepared monographs on drug therapy information. The database is available in print annually and through subscription on a password-protected website. Site licenses for access to the website are sold for thousands of dollars.

Shipping & Transit LLC, formerly known as Arrivalstar, is one of the most prolific patent trolls ever. It has filed more than 500 lawsuits alleging patent infringement. Despite having filed so many cases, it has never had a court rule on the validity of its patents. In recent years, Shipping & Transit’s usual practice is to dismiss its claims as soon as a defendant spends resources to fight back. A district court in California issued an order (PDF) this week ordering Shipping & Transit to pay a defendant's attorney's fees.

This month’s stupid patent, like many stupid patents before it, simply claims the idea of using a computer for basic calculations. U.S. Patent No. 6,817,863 (the ’863 patent) is titled “Computer program, method, and system for monitoring nutrition content of consumables and for facilitating menu planning.” It claims the process of using a computer to track nutrition information like calorie or vitamin intake. It is difficult to think of a more basic and trivial use for a computer.

As part of its Digital Single Market Strategy, the European Commission would like to introduce vertical regulations, replacing — or better conflicting with — the well-established eCommerce Directive horizontal intermediary liability regime. An upcoming revision of the Audio-visual Media Services Directive would ask platforms to put in place measures to protect minors from harmful content and to protect everyone from incitement to hatred.

(with Christophe Geiger and Oleksandr Bulayenko) This article discusses the proposed introduction in EU law of neighbouring rights for press publishers for the digital uses of their publications. This proposal is included in the European Commission’s Draft Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market of 14 September 2016, which forms an important part of the ongoing reform of copyright at EU level.

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Sarah Morris is a well-known multimedia artist and filmmaker. In 2007, she debuted her "Origami" series, 24 paintings in which she reworked, redesigned, and reshaped origami crease patterns on canvas. Several origami artists sued Morris for copyright infringement, arguing Morris had unduly appropriated their allegedly copyrightable origami crease patterns in developing the "Origami" series. The Fair Use Project teamed up with attorneys Bob Clarida and Donn Zaretsky to defend Morris. We briefed the fair use issues on summary judgment.

We filed an amicus brief in the Second Circuit on behalf of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts urging the appeals court to reverse a district court decision that ignored established fair use principles that many artists rely upon in creating their work.

“It’s a targeted program that’s good for limiting the supply of patents to the very worst actors who use litigation to shake down people for settlements,” he said. “But it doesn’t stop problems with patent quality and with operating companies attacking each other.”

"To give just a sense of just how out of touch the law has become, I askedDaniel Nazer, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to highlight the worst patents he’s come across this year. Nazer, who holds the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents (yes, really), had little trouble coming up with these four, culled from a monthly “Stupid Patent of the Month” post he writes for the EFF site.

As Nazer says, “In a world with 400,000 software patents, everyone is an infringer.”"

Anthony Falzone and Mark Schultz will debate whether significant developments in U.S. copyright law protects or violates individual freedom. Falzone, Executive Director of the Fair Use Project and a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, will evaluate the affects of copyright law on freedom of expression, while Prof. Schultz will assess the affects of copyright law on the liberty of IP creators and owners. Professor Paul Goldstein will moderate. Professor Paul Goldstein will moderate. Lunch will be served. Hosted by the Stanford Federalist Society

Updated April 27, 2011Check out photos from the Joseph Gordon-Levitt talk.

hitRECORD.org is a project Joseph Gordon-Levitt started almost five years ago. They have evolved into a professional open production company that creates and develops art and media collaboratively. Rather than just exhibiting and admiring each other's work as isolated individuals, they invite users to gather and collectively work on projects together.

Andrew is a lawyer (Harvard '94) who has worked as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. in the Obama White House, Director of Global Public Policy at Google, Vice President and Chief Policy Officer at ICANN, Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center, and as a member of the litigation team that successfully challenged the Communications Decency Act before the Supreme Court in 1997.Please RSVP for this free event.

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""Ideas, before you actually put them to work, are very vulnerable to stealing," said University of California, Hastings law professor Ben Depoorter. "We give protection to someone who can make good on that idea, and put it into a particular application, practice, expression, art form.

The song “Happy Birthday” has a long, litigious history dating back to the 1930s. Every year, people spent millions in royalties to use the song, until a class action lawsuit was brought challenging whether the owner, Warner/Chappell Music, actually owned the copyright it so aggressively enforced. Elizabeth Townsend-Gard, Tulane School of Law professor specializing in copyright law, discusses the case of “Happy Birthday.”